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The Colorado Springs condo was not the worst in the country but it was certainly in the lowest ten percent. Regular pre-fab apartment complex but section 8 none-the-less where you can almost smell the meth cooking in adjacent bathrooms. Renee and I pulled into town near dinner time and called over to the condo to make sure Sean Rouse was already there so we didn’t have to stop at the club for keys.

James Inman, Doug and Sean Rouse

It was Sean’s first time at the club and he was hanging out with James Inman who’d worked here the week before and hung out late to get tanked with us. Rouse answers the phone and says the door is unlocked, c’mon up.

We grab all our shit and stroll through the semi-projects of the apartment complex, up the stairs and to the door of the condo which was, as he’d said on the phone, unlocked. Unfortunately, it was no longer the comedy condo. They’d moved the condo to a better neighborhood sometime in the year since I’d been here and never told me. We crash through the door of the old apartment, loaded down with all our stuff to the horrified stares of some white-trash, bus-station rat with a Mohawk sitting on the floor eating dinner with his fat wife and kids. After giving pause for possible gunfire, I stuttered a “Oops, wrong door” and we beat a hasty retreat back downstairs and finally got the info for the new place.

The new condo is better but it still carries the usual scars of old itchy thrift store furniture and neglect. Rouse greets us in towel and has to ask Inman to turn on the shower for him. He’s got rheumatoid arthritis and cant grip the butter knife that is required to turn the water on. He can get it into the slot where the handle used to be but he just cant quite turn it.

These are good days in comedy. Inman and Rouse are great friends and funny as fuck in their respective insanities and states of disrepair. Sharing a condo is a source of irritation for comics but it’s actually a lot more fun than a hotel room when you’re with good folks who drink and curse and don’t generally give a fuck.

The club is your average strip mall telemarketing joint that keeps hypnotists off the streets but the owners, Larry and Lyla, are some of the good people in the business. They make you feel at home and generally don‘t give a fuck either which is a damn good thing, being in Colorado Springs where the masses are either military or moral majority or both. Meth-heads are in great attendance, too and every night we mix with them after the show at Gee Cues bar/pool hall/karaoke brokers next door to the club. I like the low-rent types and nothing is better after yelling at a roomful of rednecks than watching bad karaoke. I remember one night here years ago being blown out on mushrooms here, staring in love and horror at a 40-something year old guy with a close-cropped onion-skin mullet and Edward James Olmos skin, wearing ill-fitting leather pants and a Z-Rock t-shirt, belting out the Rappers Delight whilst attempting to moonwalk. I had to crawl under a table.